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Mt. Bryce, 3,507 m

I first saw Mt. Bryce from the summit of Mt. Athabasca in 1995. It is an impressive mountain and it definitely caught my imagination. After many discussions with my climbing buddies and close friends Clive Cook and Carey Healey, we decided to make an attempt and picked the South-East face via the "Gendarme" as our route. Ian Hislop of Calgary joined us on our trip. To get to Mt Bryce, a major logging road brings you right up from Golden to the base of the mountain, following Kinbasket Lake, the Bush River and the Rice Brook. The Rice Brook extension avoids the hike from hell over the ridge that’s described in the bible (Selected Alpine Climbs). The road is OK but you do need a high clearance vehicle. 

Our 1997 attempt of Mt. Bryce was a trip of many small disasters. First came sleepless nights at the ACC in Lake Louise where we were traumatized by the most unbelievable snorer. To add to the lack of sleep, on our warm-up day I broke my index finger when an errant rock crushed it during our aborted scramble attempt up Unnamed Peak (a few peaks over from Mt Victoria). Next came the heinous hike up to Base Camp which was only supposed to take us a couple of hours but ended up taking almost six, getting us into camp at 9:30pm (much later than we would have liked).

Unfortunately, things did not improve a lot for summit day. The weather was not great but possibly good enough. As we donned our crampons at the base of the glacier, Clive realized that his were cracked. However, noble Clive insisted that we continue without him, and so we did. For an hour anyway, until Ian discovered that he had forgotten his glacier glasses. Not being that far onto the glacier, Ian also insisted that he could make it back to camp safely so "limp finger" and Carey continued on. The couloir up to the Gendarme covers 2000 vertical feet; however, the pitch for the most part is fairly reasonable. We reached the Gendarme at noon (about 10,500 ft). Despite the poor visibility, we decided to push on and crossed over to the NW ridge. We kicked steps up along the ridge until we reached a large overhanging cornice facing down the south face. At that point, we were well into the clouds and had no better than 20 ft of visibility. To get around the cornice, we thought we would have to set up an anchor and make our way across the much steeper north face. Since it was already 2:30 and we had little idea how much further we had to go, we decided to throw in the towel and head back down. 

The trip down went quite well, mostly plunge stepping on short rope. The only concern was the balling of snow under our crampons. A little excitement was provided when Carey slid by me after losing his footing on the upper section of the Gendarme couloir. Fortunately, I was able to get my ice axe well planted before he loaded up the rope. Only a little worse for wear, we arrived back at camp around 6pm and handed the baton over to Clive and Ian to make an attempt the next day. 

Clive and Ian made an early start and were up on the NW ridge by 9:30am, making incredible time. After their own snow balling incident on the way back down, they were back in camp by noon. Unfortunately, they too had been turned back by weather and the cornice, shy of the summit.

Rather than wait for better weather, we all decided to cut our loses and head back, swearing that we would not return. The commitment lasted about a month. Soon we were thinking about how close we had come and that we had to try again.

On our second attempt, neither Clive nor Ian could make it. Clive was in Buenos Aires making plans for an Andes trip and Ian could not get away. The 1998 trip turned out to be a lot more successful than our 1997 attempt. We learned a lot from our numerous errors of the previous year (check crampons, pack less than 100 lb., etc.) and the weather cooperated. The 1998 trip included Carey, Bill Joerissen and I. 

I am going to be bold and claim that it was the fastest Toronto to Toronto successful ascent of Mt. Bryce on record. It took four days door to door. I'm must admit that I'm working on the odds that very few have likely attempted Mt. Bryce from TO, but failing that, that even fewer would want to race back to TO, afterward. 

I left for Bryce on a late flight, arriving in Calgary at 2:00 am. We were on the road early and at base camp on Mt. Bryce by Friday at 6:00pm. This year we scouted a much improved route about 500m further up the logging road making the hike up much more pleasant.

The biggest difference from last year was the incredible lack of snow and beautiful clear skies. The lack of snow made the climb much harder than last year but the clear skies compensated. Though, our route was very similar to that of the previous year, it took 15 hours from camp to camp including over 7 hours of downclimbing (facing in). We short roped the bulk of the route, using a few running belays in the steepest sections. We were on the summit by noon with a spectacular view of Mt. Columbia, the Twins, Mt. Andromeda, Mt. Athabasca and the entire Columbia icefields. The most amazing sight however was looking back down the NE ridge where we could see clearly how close we had come last year - less than 30ft from where we stood! 

The biggest hazard on our way down was the incessant rock slides down the east side of the Gendarme couloir. Fortunately, a large trench created by melt water run off separated us from the worst of it. Nevertheless the odd rock would come whirring by our heads ensuring that we stayed motivated to move in spite of our aching calves and ankles. We were back at camp by 8pm. 

We hiked out the next day and were back in Calgary by 10pm. By lucking out on and getting on an early stand-by flight (even though Air Canada was on strike), I was back at home by noon on Monday, tired but happy.